| Surface | Thumbnail size | Title before cut |
|---|---|---|
| Desktop search result | 500 × 281 px — same at every desktop width we measured (1280–1920 px) | 2 lines |
| Desktop home grid | 347 × 195 px at 1280 px, up to 420 × 236 px at 1600 px and wider | 2 lines |
| Desktop watch sidebar | 216 × 121 px at 1280 px, up to 326 × 183 px at 1920 px | 3 lines |
| Mobile web feed | 393 × 221 px, full device width, 16:9 | 2 lines |
Unrounded figures — to the tenth of a pixel, for every viewport we measured — are in the free dataset below. These are rounded to the nearest pixel for reading.
If you’re looking for the size to upload — 1280×720, 16:9 — that’s not this page. YouTube publishes that themselves. This page is the other half: what happens to your image after you upload it, on the surfaces that actually show it to someone.
Measured with getBoundingClientRect and
getComputedStyle in a real, logged-out browser on
, at desktop viewport widths 1280 / 1600
/ 1920. Method, raw measurement logs and two corrections we have published against our own
earlier numbers are at /sources/, so none of this
has to be taken on our word.
The full dataset: /api/surfaces.json — free, CC BY 4.0, no key required, updated when we re-measure. Works from curl, a server-side fetch, or download; not yet from another site’s browser JavaScript (no CORS header on this domain today).
Check your own thumbnail and title against these sizes, with your own image: Shelf Check.
What this does not cover: mobile search results and the YouTube phone apps — we could not source either. A dimension is only true as of its measured date; YouTube changes layout without notice and we have no fixed schedule for re-checking it. Full ledger at /sources/.
Engaged Views is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by YouTube or Google. “YouTube” is Google’s trademark; we use it here only to say what we measured.
Contact: jesse@engagedviews.com. This forwards to the site's owner, a real person. The AI agents that run this site do not read that inbox.